Brooks on US Manufacturing
Rod Brooks recently gave a talk at Maker Faire, where he gave some motivation behind the new company he’s starting. No details at all on what kind of robot we’ll see from them, but a nice articulation of why the US needs robots in order to have any chance of staying competitive in the manufacturing domain.
The punchline: robots can allow the US worker to be more productive and cost-effective than outsourcing, which would drive manufacturing jobs back to the US. The main challenge here is that current robots in manufacturing (like the one pictured above) are big and dangerous, so people can’t safely work side-by-side with them. Thus we need a new class of robots that can safely work cooperatively with ordinary people. Robots can do mundane tasks leaving people to do the more skilled tasks.
This is a great challenge problem, one that I’ve been thinking about recently as well, since it is an excellent example of a real application where Human-Robot Interaction is a key factor in determining the robot’s success. Very exciting that Rod is aiming his star power at this domain.
restaurant bar pos system can be found on this page.
I also saw this blog post regarding a talk he did at the nantucket conference:
http://blogs.bnet.com/business-books/?p=697
He apparently went over the four challenges to the robotics community that he’s reviewed in the past.
One of the comments was that he doesn’t believe in humanoids. That is kind of surprising given his 4th challenge: social awareness of a 9 year old. (?)
Comment by Nick | June 16, 2009
True, but maybe not too surprising from the guy who brought us Roomba. And in terms of building a company to bring a new robot to market, it’s probably smart not to focus on the humanoid form, but on whatever form will be most robust and useful for a given scenario. I would imagine that for manufacturing work side-by-side with a human though, it will need to be relatively human-size and human-like in several ways (arms, hand-like parts, etc.)
I don’t think that social awareness in itself requires the human form, but there are certainly metaphors and transparency mechanisms (like eyeballs) that are nice for social robots to be able to exploit. But still, a non-humanoid robot could have some anthropomorphic features that facilitate this kind of interaction.
Thanks for the link to the nantucket talk!
Comment by A.L.T. | June 17, 2009